Comment by sweetjesus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sweetjesus | Hacker News Reader

This is going to be difficult to accept probably, but fwiw here's the gist of what modern psychiatry has to say: the brain is not divided into conscious thought and unconscious thought; rather, all the brain's work takes place unconsciously, on all topics, all the time. What we then call consciousness is a product of the fully occupied and engaged unconscious mind.

So in terms of the headline, your unconscious is not a better developer than you are; your unconscious is your only developer.

Furthermore, [while emotion and logic both exist] there are not logical thoughts and emotional thoughts, emotion is engaged in thought all the time. You will actually form different "logical" conclusions on the basis of your mood, emotional state, etc. (As an example in grossly stereotypical terms, this is what you might imagine happening "so clearly" in a PMSing woman; the fallacy is that men are not doing the same thing all the time, they are.) So, to the blog poster's point, his unconscious "better developer" is actually the emotional preoccupations of his consciousness getting in the way of his being able to get to realize what his uncounscious developer is capable of. [Didn't mean to overstate that: in the case where he notices his unconscious mind coming up with good work, sometimes it just takes more time to create/uncover a good solution; just saying it's the same portions of the brain continuing to chew on the problem, conscious or not.]

For people interested, the brain science book "Thinking Fast and Slow" is very good, it will convince you that your brain does not work the way you think it does. It doesn't necessarily say all what I said above, some of that comes from psychiatry. Freud's enduring contribution to the field was his realization how much unconscious thought was taking place. BTW the term "unconscious" is preferred because historically in the field, "subconscious" is a term associated with Jung's "collective unconscious".

The term unconscious is i think used for a non-reproduce able and deduceable though process. You can retrace the steps rational, process orientated thinking took you to a result. Even if provided by the unconsciousness, the illusion of control remains. Subconsciousness as stated by the author, is the type of processes, where the brain did not bother to invent a backstory for its product.

I felt immediately that my experience was different to the OP, since I do not perceive my "unconscious developer" as a different person but merely another perspective on myself. Thanks for suggesting how this arises systematically.

When I was in my teens and had lots of time to think about these things, I came to this conclusion. That I, what I think of as being me, is just a facade that moves things into and out of my subconscious. When I want to think about something, I 'query' the subconscious and wait for a response.

Forgive me if I put as much faith in this answer as anything else said by psychologists or psychiatrists over the last 100 years (I.e. almost completely irreproducible and constantly overturned claims). I'll believe it once psychology is reduced to computational neurophysiology.

100 years ago, the proponents of the "plum pudding model" and "ether" were still alive and kicking. Good science takes time, and must account for all the evidence. Psychology won't be reduced till we achieve "computational neuroemotional physiology". Don't let an enduring discomfort with human emotions give you a scientific blind spot to human nature, otherwise your AI will have trouble finding its way out of the uncanny valley. ;)

And yet the vast majority of experimental and even theoretical physics was correct (and simply a limiting case of a more general theory), in diametric opposition to psychology. Physics has never thrown the baby out with the bathwater, but psychology does it every generation or two.

> computational neuroemotional physiology

Not sure what you mean by this. Computational neurophysiology would obviously subsume emotional behavior (unless you subscribe to dualism).

You seem to have nothing to say on the topic of emotion, except that the 1000's of people who study it in universities, clinics and hospitals around the world have nothing correct to say...

I am certain that your emotions on the subject are clouding your judgement. But to be the consistent razor of occam as you present yourself, shouldn't your term be computational neuro? what does physiology have to do with it?

What are you on about? I'm not talking about emotion; in case you forgot, we're in a thread where you provided some pseudo-scientific claim about the nature of consciousness. I'm questioning the validity of that claim. You seem to have gone off on a tangent about the nature of emotion.

fwiw, I was describing in layperson's terms what is going on in the brain, in response to which, you are being too reductive. It's like you're telling a chemist to stop talking about what we know about chemistry because it's all quantum mechanics, or a chemist telling a biologist that it's all chemistry. Well, sure it is, but I only post when I have something to add to the conversation. The average person is unaware of how much in the brain is unconscious thought, and the average person believes that emotions are separate from thoughts. I think my presentation was perfect and succinct to achieve that goal, and I contributed to a greater understanding.

I hope you don't imagine that consciousness in the human brain would be possible without integrating all of the unconscious thoughts and emotion-thoughts taking place under the hood. I'm certain that you are not aware that it was your emotions driving you to reply to me, and not logic.

And building a computational brain neuron by neuron? sure, as long as you throw in 20 years of cyborg childhood too... let us know how you're coming with that.

In what way would computational neurophysiology not capture emotions? Nobody is claiming that emotions don't exist, but I should hope we can agree that they arise within our neurons.

my point was not about where emotions or thoughts or logic comes from, nor do I think that's particularly relevant to the "My subconscious is a better developer" idea. My point was that conscious thoughts are (1) the result of many unconscious thoughts and (2) driven/influenced much more by emotion than people realize. To add that underlying it is neurology is like saying underlying that is chemistry and quantum mechanics. In this context, so what?

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